Customers’ expectations have never been higher. They want choice and flexibility. They require intelligent networks and infrastructure that’s intuitive, secure, easy to use and manage, and able to adapt to the specific requirements of their applications.

Today we’re excited to announce Cisco ONE Software, which offers a simplified solution to the most relevant, frequently-used customer scenarios in the data center, wide area network and local access networks. Cisco ONE is a big deal, and it’s an important piece of our larger software strategy in a world where value is increasingly delivered to customers through software.

Think about the technology disruptions and market transitions our customers are experiencing today. Cloud, virtualization, big data, software-defined networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), the Internet of Everything – software is the enabling mechanism at the heart of each. In recent years, software has played an increasingly key role in our technology and solutions. Today, we are the fifth-largest software company in terms of software revenues, and the third-largest SaaS provider.

As the Cisco Partner Ecosystem continues its growth, and customers transform IT to increase business outcomes, we want to create opportunity for our partners so they can choose what makes sense for their business, and pick the roles they want to play in the marketplace. A priority is driving partner success around new consumption models and software, as well as cloud.

Today at the Cisco Live event in Milan, Italy, we are announcing an expansion of our offers into infrastructure software with the launch of Cisco ONE Software, which presents a large opportunity for partners. You can learn more reading John Brigden’s blog also posted today.

We are also announcing the re-launch of Cisco Meraki as an enterprise class, cloud-managed IT solution. When Meraki was acquired, it was identified as an excellent area within Cisco for growth in the midmarket and predominantly for wireless. However, with more than 20 hardware product updates and more than 40 software releases in two years, we are not only seeing Meraki succeed in midmarket, but in the enterprise space as well. Our customers are not only deploying Meraki for Wi-Fi but as a broader network, security, and mobility management solution. Cisco’s Rob Soderbery provides more details in his blog here.

We realize that software is core to this new era of business, and I want you to know that software is core to Cisco. Let me delve into the details of what this means to partners. Read More »

Forrester research indicates that private cloud has entered into the formal IT portfolio by becoming a core part of data center strategy. I have been writing about the sea change underway in private cloud. This sea change means that automating the provisioning of virtual machines and their infrastructure is inadequate in a world where your users expect continuous delivery.

Application developers want to accelerate application stack design and deployment. Your customers expect to consume applications and their supporting infrastructures on-demand and take delivery within minutes.

Doubt this fact? I consistently hear from senior executives about the growth of shadow IT within their organizations simply because the data center cannot meet delivery expectations.

At CiscoLive Milan today, the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite was introduced. I can hear your response now…..What another cloud management platform? So I will respond: no way!

Many of today’s solutions are simple toolkits that require IT administrators to customize and maintain integrations between tools, processes, applications and teams. IT needs to become software and infrastructure engineers. End users have expectations of simplicity and out-of-box operation and these tools simply frustrate meeting end users expectations.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is an engineered software solution not a platform. It delivers a hybrid-ready private cloud software solution that contains out-of-box installation and content. There are out-of-box utensils designed specifically to accelerate the design and deployment of your existing and cloud-first applications – across private and hybrid environments. Learn more by watching this video.

Cisco technology helps enable first live streams of World Series action

With the World Series wrapping up with game seven tonight and a new champion to be crowned, it’s a great time to reflect on the game and its impact on fans.

Baseball is much more than a game in America. For well over 150 years, the sport has been woven into the fabric of our cities, neighborhoods, families and culture. For millions like me, the World Series has produced memories that last a lifetime. Every October, I reflect on the heartbreak I suffered in 1985 when my beloved St. Louis Cardinals blew a 3 games to 1 lead to the Kansas City Royals.

And all along, Major League Baseball has used technology to make the fall classic available to as many fans as possible.

The 1921 World Series between the New York Giants and Yankees was the first World Series to be broadcast on radio. The 1947 World Series was the first to be televised, and the 1955 World Series was the first televised in color.

Now, another first in 2014, as large numbers of fans have been watching the first live streams of World Series action, representing a milestone in Major League Baseball broadcast delivery and allowing fans to watch on the go with an MLB.TV subscription. Each Giants-Royals game televised by FOX in the 110th Fall Classic is also available live online and via mobile to existing MLB.TV subscribers at no additional cost.

There has been some seismic activity happening in Bay Area and the epicenter for all Virtual Networking shifts is right here at Cisco HQ in San Jose. (Our sympathies go to all those affected by the real earthquake further to the north.) At Cisco, it’s all about the applications and the shift to dynamic network virtualization. Cisco pioneered virtual networking with Nexus 1000V virtual switch and recently incorporated it in the application aware Application Virtual Switch (AVS), for Cisco ACI-enabled networks. Cisco is excited to announce the availability of Nexus 1000 Release 3.1 of Nexus1000V for vSphere (available for download here). We are showing the upcoming generation of the virtual switch at VMworld in San Francisco this week.

Nexus1000V is the edge switch for virtual environments, bringing the network edge right up to the virtual machine, and connecting virtual ports to the physical network and beyond. The Nexus 1000V is the foundation for our virtual network overlay portfolio, including all of our virtual L4-7 application and security services, our cloud orchestration software, VXLANs and more. It is also at the heart of AVS, a purpose-built, hypervisor-resident virtual network edge switch designed for the Application Centric Infrastructure.

Release 3.1 is a new major release enabling enterprise and cloud provider customers running the vSphere hypervisor to leverage the distributed virtual firewall VSG, expand VXLAN footprint in the datacenter, improve secure isolation thru Cisco TrustSec and dramatically simplify updates through Cisco VSUM (Virtual Switch Update Manager). Most of the new features are value add to the Advanced Edition. New customers will need a Ver 3 specific license to use the full functionality of Ver 3. Existing customers with support contract are automatically entitled to free upgrade to Ver 3. AVS incorporates Nexus 1000V capabilities with consistent application policy enforcement for virtual workloads and unprecedented end-to-end visibility for applications in your data center.

Increased Scalability (Advanced Edition)– More than doubles the scale from the previous release. The virtual switch now supports 250 hosts/servers per switch with 10,000 ports per switch. In addition it supports 4094 active VLANs and 16 million VXLAN (6144 active VXLANs) per switch across 6144 port profiles.

VXLAN control plane: BGP based control plane across multiple virtual switches provide expanded Layer 2 domain footprint that can potentially support nearly 40,000 VMs in a single domain

Increased Resiliency – Supports headless Port bring up where Virtual Machines can be bought up on the host even if VEM is offline i.e. the VSM is not reachable by VEM. Both VSM headful and headless VM vMotion is supported.

Simplified Deployment, upgrade and visibility with Cisco VSUM – Cisco VSUM is a FREE virtual appliance that enables Server and Network administrators to Deploy, Upgrade and Monitor Nexus1000V and to Deploy and Upgrade Cisco AVS from within their vCenter web interface.

Customer Experience –Here’s what one of our Beta customers, Josh Coen says about Cisco VSUM. Josh is a Principal Cloud Architect with Varrow and has been working in the IT industry since 1999, with a heavy focus on virtualization and storage since 2008.

We’ll be showing a lot of these features this week. Come by our booth and check it out. If you are around #VMworld this week, give us a shout out on twitter using Cisco hash tag #ciscovmw. For those of you that can’t make it out to VMworld, listen to the review of these new features in Ver 3.1 in this webcast.

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